amongst the highly cultured to bring home a goodly store of literature
as to gather objects of art which might merely please the sensuous taste
and touch only the outer surface of the mind.[56]

But it was deemed by no means desirable to limit the influences of the
new culture to the minds of the mature. There was, indeed, a school of
cautious Hellenists that might have preferred this view, and would at
any rate have exercised a careful discrimination between those elements
of the Greek training which would strengthen the young mind by giving it
a wider range of vision and a new gallery of noble lives and those which
would lead to mere display, to effeminacy, nay (who could tell?) to
positive depravity. But this could not be the point of view of society
as a whole. If the elegant Roman was to be half a Greek, he must learn
during the tender and impressionable age to move his limbs and modulate
his voice in true Hellenic wise. Hence the picture which Scipio
Aemilianus, sane Hellenist and stout Roman, gazed at with astonished
eyes and described in the vigorous and uncompromising language suited to
a former censor. "I was told," he said, "that free-born boys and girls
went to a dancing school and moved amidst disreputable professors of the
art. I could not bring my mind to believe it; but I was taken to such a
school myself, and Good Heavens! What did I see there! More than fifty
boys and girls, one of them, I am ashamed to say, the son of a candidate
for office, a boy wearing the golden boss, a lad not less than twelve
years of age. He was jingling a pair of castanets and dancing a step
which an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might
have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern
dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the
exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social
ambition which it reveals--an ambition which would be perpetuated
throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, which